As far as "sympathizers", we may want to wait until DARPA discovers a device for reading minds before we start figthing people based on their states of mind.
What would be better would be to shrink such things down to bacteria/nano size and implant explosives, ala 'Diamond Age'.. Now _that's_ research I'd support...
As somebody who lived in the Eastern block I can tell you that the idea that Reagan and his poodle (Thatcher was it?) somehow won the cold war is a hilarious fantasy. If you want to give credit to one person you will be much more accurate to credit Madonna.
Bullshit. It was bankrupting the Soviet thru SDI threats, building out Pershing and Trident, and the Pope's visit to Solidarity that catalyzed the end of the cold war. The ex-Soviet officials up to Gorby himself admit as much, and there are plenty of ex-dissidents who credit Reagan, Thatcher, and the Pope with the straws that broke the commie back. I'm sure there's Osties clinging to their DDR flags who would, to this day, bitterly complain about the fall of the Berlin wall and the death of their ideology. Fuck them.
The end of communism, particularly its peaceful end, was never inevitable, especially if those who advocated coexistence and accomodation were permitted to prop them up any further with more agricultural subsidies and humanitarian aid. Why didn't the fall start after 1956? 1968? Reagan's hardcore stance (or, dare I dream, a competent CIA?) kept killing Soviet premiers until they found one that could make a deal.
... Any talk about switching to either H2 or e- power for cars really depends on breaking thru the nuclear superstition barrier. We don't have 50 years to wait for fusion (hasn't practical fusion power been 50 years away for over 50 years?).
Then again, why even bother.. The Chinese will have PBRs and in 10 years, they'll own and operate GM and/or Ford anyway (after having bought them out of bankrupcy and smashed the UAW)...
Let's see is it Eastasia or Eurasia. Which enemy is it again? I forget. Who is it that when defeated we can declare peace and not just always move though continual war?
It's against the people who destroyed the twin towers and all those who sympathize with them and their ideologies.
Also, we fought and won a cold ideological war of a much starker, more manichaean nature against communism that lasted fifty years. And the commies had nucular weapons. If you're old enough to recall, the arguments among the allies were much the same ("cowboy" president, "reckless" policies, the British PM being a "lackey" or "poodle", etc), and they're as stupid now as they turned out to be then.
Anyway, as a side note for those people asking, "What has darpa research done for us recently?" Well, keep in mind that when academic research into the original internet protocols and such was in progress you could have asked the same thing, not knowing what was coming. Also realize that the skill set required for true research and the skill set required for producing a product are not the same thing. Some people are suited for research some are not. Both kinds of people are needed for longterm progress.
Then again, what was the purpose of Internet Protocol development in the first place? "Pure research"? Or command and control capability in the event of nuclear war?
Instead, someone has to do the research, and often that research does not have a clear (short-term) monetary incentive, so don't expect industry to do it.
That's what academia and philanthropic foundations are for.
... When you're not at war, keep your techies on the payroll doing whatever will keep 'em interested, but when you're at war, refocus.
The US is at war. Get used to it.
If you don't like the strings that are attached with the money, don't accept the money. Theo didn't, which is fine, and his posse whined about it somewhat, which is annoying but also fine.
Besides, given how much stuff DoD is buying COTS, it looks like private industry and academia can handle 'pure' research anyway, and if you're gonna fight a number of wars, give away tax cuts for the rich and free viagra for the elderly, you gotta find the money somewhere...
... Just buy the stuff online, where the "rebates" are already factored in.
I'm still waiting on several rebates for a number of years, this is really a scam, and I haven't bought anything at Best Buy, CompUSA, or any of these other places for years...
(anything where the tax is less than shipping, I go with J&R, where tax is more than shipping I go online)
I have to wonder why GIMP would have chosen to use their own naming scheme for stuff like the 'Marquee Tools' or 'Lasso Tools'.
I mean, looking at the fellow's side-by-side toolbar listings, it seems to me that the names used by Photoshop tools are more human-readable and descriptive than the associated GIMP tools. Is GIMP attempting to preempt any possible legal action on Adobe's part?
I only hope it wasn't to be difficult to Photoshop people.
Seriously, I wish IT wasn't such a sausage fest, but when the dominant cohort is so into such 'offensive-to-females' stuff as Python, HHG, Scifi/Fantasy in general, and poor hygiene, it's unfortunately no surprise that it is.
I have met four females in my lifetime that didn't hate Python (the troupe, not necessarily the language). I am related to two of them. Conversely, I have no interest in unicorns, clothing designers or shiny bits of carbon.
ps: just in case you're a complete dink and take the Subject seriously, MEGO when it comes to anything over mild algebra (such as determining tips or doing exchange rate estimates in my head). At this point, most of the work you'd do in the real world is semiotic rather than arithmetic (or, often, even algorithmic). Or, for me, it involves ripping things out of things and putting them into other things. (or, lately, for me it involves shooting tons of Waffen-SS and trying to flank Panzers with my Shermans)
I'm still pretty surprised that even after second interviews people aren't asking for references.. I have a pretty large number (over a dozen, with permission of course) of folks in a range of positions and areas (not just tech).
Granted, the last hellhole I suffered in was far worse. The place was run like a fucking gulag, and while I'm no fan of cashing in 401ks to make rent, I would rather be doing that and dodging credit card callers than trying not to kick certain people down certain flights of stairs.
And my favorite job would still be there, and me thriving in it, if it weren't for some fucking Arab terrorists. All the sponsors and advertisers for the project pulled out within a week of 9/11. Didn't help that our building was 6 blocks away.
In much the same way Warner Brothers characters would begin to resemble food products when trapped on a desert island, The Ax is beginning to look like a HOWTO...
Mac OS X isn't revolutionary. It really is the synthesis of everything that we all wanted in an OS back in the late 1980s. If you take the better features of early Macintosh, Amiga, and all those competing projects that were attempting add a GUI to Unix, and mung them all together and then work out most of the kinks, you end up with Mac OS X.
That sounds more KDE to me! And that's why I prefer KDE to any other non-OS X UI!
Seriously, the OS X UI and Cocoa frameworks are much cleaner and better thought-out than a munged hodgepodge of paradigms. Apple's value proposition is related to not just the technical underpinnings but the thoughtfulness of design and attention to end users. Apple sweats the interface details.
And the real question now is. . . Where do we go from here? After achieving the OS that everybody wanted 15+ years ago, now Apple's OS team suddenly find themselves without a goal. They've resorted to tacking on a hodgepodge of minor trinkets and calling it a major upgrade. It must be hard to step back and admit that they're done with this OS, and that continually adding new features to it may no longer be the right approach.
I'm not gonna try to push Tiger as a huge innovation, I have sympathy for your point here. However, to a certain extent, if maintaining OS X on the cutting edge (which may be a relatively slow crawl at times, if you're waiting for enough hardware to drive the really revolutionary stuff like voice recog or more miniaturization or whatnot) means putting up with continuous point releases to keep engineers working, that's fine with me. The US gov't does this to a degree with companies like Electric Boat: they don't _need_ new ships all the time, but they need to maintain the ability to build them, and they can't afford to let the skilled people become unavailable. If keeping a solid core of engineers at Apple paid and happy means the occasional softball release, so be it.
And honestly, I don't think Tiger's a softball release. For me, Panther was, and for any particular Macista a particular OSX release may be. But Tiger's got interesting stuff at the framework level, and who knows how useful Spotlight and Dashboard stuff will be?
If it was up to me, I would focus on maintenance, bugfixes, security, optimization. . . and de-emphasize the OS as a product. Put the OS back in its proper place, I say! An operating system shouldn't be a featured product, it should be merely a component -- a part of the computer, just like the hard drive, the RAM, the processor, etc. -- that is required for running applications.
Work for Intel then?;)
Seriously, when it comes to defining the place for an OS, you have to take the user into account. This attitude is great for hardware folks and embedded developers, but for desktop people it's toxic. As an end user, I want someone _else_ to make a lot of these decisions, because I don't want to waste my time on them. Having an 'advanced user' preference pane to offer finer-grained control of things is nice, but it shouldn't be necessary for normals.
The goal should be to provide a stable, efficient foundation for apps to run on, because apps are where your work gets done.
Sounds like a kernel to me, and Darwin does a pretty decent job of this. Cocoa frameworks also contribute, and Apple's OS releases typically contain a ton of interesting framework improvements (like CoreImage and CoreVideo for Tiger for example.. Imagine realtime SGI-like stream filters for video and image effects) that make upgrading worthwhile (and mandatory for the new apps enabled and/or improved by these new optimized libs).
I agree, I look at OS X releases as being similar to Linux 'stable' releases, less comprehensive at the kernel level but making up for that at the UI level.
I still think it would make sense for Apple to just go with Mac OS X as the name of the OS, and not link it to the previous OS version.. It really isn't version 10 in line with the previous 20 year chain of development at all. When enough people have migrated off of 'classic' Mac OS, Apple should break the link and just go with Mac OS X as the OS name. Also, you'd have a version 0, which AFAIK would be a first for a production release of an OS (the initial release of Mac OS X, should they change to this mechanism, would technically be Mac OS X v 0.0;)
So the next release should be Mac OS X version 5, or shortened to X.5 (or X.V for the anal).
Granted, I bitch and whine all the time about how crap Apple's default graphics boards are so primitive compared to the latest and greatest, and because of that OS X gaming won't be on the cutting edge.
However, for the UI stuff that doesn't require constant high framerate + 3D rendering + physics + AI, these GPUs should be completely tits for Quartz Extreme.
That is to say, for nongaming purposes, these GPUs are essentially desktop accelerators and feature enablers. Even the lowly FX5200 and Radeon 9200 w/32 or 64MB RAM is fine for this.
If Tiger ends up pushing more work onto these (for Macs) underworked GPUs, the UI will actually _speed up_. And the lowest-spec Mac (Mac mini) will have enough GPU to handle Quartz Extreme handily, while those with older AGP Macs should still be able to find 32/64MB QE cards fairly cheap.
And to be quite honest, one of the main reasons I built a dual celeron back in the day was to have all my KDE candy run more responsively.. I have no problem dedicating a cpu towards UI vanity;)
If I can kick my gaming addictions, I could lose Windows completely.
The 2.5 big problems with OS X gaming: * delays of 6-12 months in porting, and only the popular games get ported * performance is lower (at least in Doom3 and some other GL games) * games cost more and are harder to get pirated (this is the.5)
To be quite honest, I'm completely addicted to OpenTTD, which runs like lightning on my 667mhz TiPB. It runs on Linux and other OSes, and I've run it out to 1920x1200.
Another good game is a port of 'Elite' to OS X called 'Oolite'. It's even built in Xcode so it was super simple for me to put in a tiny hack to support improved scaling of keyboard repetition feedback.
UT2004 is available for OSX. As is World of Warcraft, WC3, Doom3, Halo, Sim*, Homeworld 2, MoH, CoD, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, et al. The games are there, it just took awhile for them to make the transition.
I'm definitely able to waste whole weeks on my Powerbook playing OpenTTD, which is handy given there isn't a whole lot else to do in between job interviews and nagging headhunters:p
... if you don't like it, write your own replacement that isn't in java.
One has to wonder when some enterprising group will just take the file format code and bung it into open competitors that don't rely on Java. I would prefer the KOffice suite, but LTIC OO.o had the superior MSOffice format functionality.
Re:Slashdot users use mostly Windows
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 1
Its the dirty little secret of/. that for all of our pro-Linux, "I love OSX" rhetoric, Slashdot users use mostly Wintel.
You sure that's not just people hacking their user agents to get around website brain damage?
(But I won't go into them here. The mac police would only mod me Troll)
If it isn't already done, I'd like to humbly nominate Otis' law of Mod whining: Those who post whines about moderation get mod'd down regardless of the content of the rest of the post. Including this post of course;)
(if there's already such a law (a distant relative of Godwin's law) let me know)
... thanks to Sony's choice to proprietarize the UMD rather than just using a mini DVD in a caddy. I can pretty much guarantee that nobody's gonna rebuy movies for this thing, at least in the US. Yeah, you could put movies on a mildly less proprietary Memory Stick, but teens aren't gonna have the $$$ for tons of 512MB sticks..
Of course, the geek bandolier squad will come out with the whole 'single purpose devices are better' argument, and I'm sure plenty of geeks and game fiends will buy the PSP and only play games on it. For me, though, $250 is a bit rich for that, and the so-called multifunctionality is a bit of a snow job due to Sony's longstanding format nonsensicality.
I just want to see Apple take that gorgeous LCD and wrap a star-killing PDA phone around it, using a scaled-up iPod mini look with touchscreen. Something with internal disk, HWR, 3G, voice recognition (for bluetooth headset/handsfree dialing etc.), the works. Adding the ability to run Dashboard apps even if you don't use a PPC full-blown OS X env would be super kewl.
If you've got suggestions, I'm sure the GNOME and KDE people would be more than happy to read them...
Then again Apple seems to be doing a pretty good job of releasing whole new apps (and occasionally new app categories), libraries/frameworks, programming tools and "paradigms" with new OS releases, not just eye candy..
* beef out the ipod mini case style so... *.. it can handle a 4" 16x9 screen, 720x480 resolution. * make it a touchscreen * emulate the ipod interface with the touchscreen * select a video and hold the unit sideways to watch the video.. Home videos, PVR recordings, iMovies, ripped DVDs, etc. * incorporate a 3G phone, bluetooth and wifi * Newton/Inkwell HWR and full PDA functionality * drop in a 60g drive, with firewire 800 and usb2 * nice to have: GPS (probably part of the 3G phone chipset * Super cool: put in support for Dashboard apps!!
Slashdot Mirror
Hence the expression, "greedy as a biofuel generator."
Pure biodiesel will corrode rubber fuel lines and gaskets.
:/
Older diesels (like mine) would need inorganic fuel lines and gaskets to go B100. Of course, I can't even find B20 in my neck of the woods yet
Just sayin'.
As far as "sympathizers", we may want to wait until DARPA discovers a device for reading minds before we start figthing people based on their states of mind.
What would be better would be to shrink such things down to bacteria/nano size and implant explosives, ala 'Diamond Age'.. Now _that's_ research I'd support...
As somebody who lived in the Eastern block I can tell you that the idea that Reagan and his poodle (Thatcher was it?) somehow won the cold war is a hilarious fantasy. If you want to give credit to one person you will be much more accurate to credit Madonna.
Bullshit. It was bankrupting the Soviet thru SDI threats, building out Pershing and Trident, and the Pope's visit to Solidarity that catalyzed the end of the cold war. The ex-Soviet officials up to Gorby himself admit as much, and there are plenty of ex-dissidents who credit Reagan, Thatcher, and the Pope with the straws that broke the commie back. I'm sure there's Osties clinging to their DDR flags who would, to this day, bitterly complain about the fall of the Berlin wall and the death of their ideology. Fuck them.
The end of communism, particularly its peaceful end, was never inevitable, especially if those who advocated coexistence and accomodation were permitted to prop them up any further with more agricultural subsidies and humanitarian aid. Why didn't the fall start after 1956? 1968? Reagan's hardcore stance (or, dare I dream, a competent CIA?) kept killing Soviet premiers until they found one that could make a deal.
... Any talk about switching to either H2 or e- power for cars really depends on breaking thru the nuclear superstition barrier. We don't have 50 years to wait for fusion (hasn't practical fusion power been 50 years away for over 50 years?).
Then again, why even bother.. The Chinese will have PBRs and in 10 years, they'll own and operate GM and/or Ford anyway (after having bought them out of bankrupcy and smashed the UAW)...
There has been no rationing, no draft, no tax hikes...
W ar
OK...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish-American_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine-American_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf_War
And where were these policies during the Cold War?
Let's see is it Eastasia or Eurasia. Which enemy is it again? I forget. Who is it that when defeated we can declare peace and not just always move though continual war?
It's against the people who destroyed the twin towers and all those who sympathize with them and their ideologies.
Also, we fought and won a cold ideological war of a much starker, more manichaean nature against communism that lasted fifty years. And the commies had nucular weapons. If you're old enough to recall, the arguments among the allies were much the same ("cowboy" president, "reckless" policies, the British PM being a "lackey" or "poodle", etc), and they're as stupid now as they turned out to be then.
Anyway, as a side note for those people asking, "What has darpa research done for us recently?" Well, keep in mind that when academic research into the original internet protocols and such was in progress you could have asked the same thing, not knowing what was coming. Also realize that the skill set required for true research and the skill set required for producing a product are not the same thing. Some people are suited for research some are not. Both kinds of people are needed for longterm progress.
Then again, what was the purpose of Internet Protocol development in the first place? "Pure research"? Or command and control capability in the event of nuclear war?
Instead, someone has to do the research, and often that research does not have a clear (short-term) monetary incentive, so don't expect industry to do it.
That's what academia and philanthropic foundations are for.
... When you're not at war, keep your techies on the payroll doing whatever will keep 'em interested, but when you're at war, refocus.
The US is at war. Get used to it.
If you don't like the strings that are attached with the money, don't accept the money. Theo didn't, which is fine, and his posse whined about it somewhat, which is annoying but also fine.
Besides, given how much stuff DoD is buying COTS, it looks like private industry and academia can handle 'pure' research anyway, and if you're gonna fight a number of wars, give away tax cuts for the rich and free viagra for the elderly, you gotta find the money somewhere...
... Just buy the stuff online, where the "rebates" are already factored in.
I'm still waiting on several rebates for a number of years, this is really a scam, and I haven't bought anything at Best Buy, CompUSA, or any of these other places for years...
(anything where the tax is less than shipping, I go with J&R, where tax is more than shipping I go online)
... I mean there's already a version of MSSQL for Unix systems that's superior. It's called Sybase ASE.
... one of these...
I have to wonder why GIMP would have chosen to use their own naming scheme for stuff like the 'Marquee Tools' or 'Lasso Tools'.
I mean, looking at the fellow's side-by-side toolbar listings, it seems to me that the names used by Photoshop tools are more human-readable and descriptive than the associated GIMP tools. Is GIMP attempting to preempt any possible legal action on Adobe's part?
I only hope it wasn't to be difficult to Photoshop people.
Seriously, I wish IT wasn't such a sausage fest, but when the dominant cohort is so into such 'offensive-to-females' stuff as Python, HHG, Scifi/Fantasy in general, and poor hygiene, it's unfortunately no surprise that it is.
I have met four females in my lifetime that didn't hate Python (the troupe, not necessarily the language). I am related to two of them. Conversely, I have no interest in unicorns, clothing designers or shiny bits of carbon.
ps: just in case you're a complete dink and take the Subject seriously, MEGO when it comes to anything over mild algebra (such as determining tips or doing exchange rate estimates in my head). At this point, most of the work you'd do in the real world is semiotic rather than arithmetic (or, often, even algorithmic). Or, for me, it involves ripping things out of things and putting them into other things. (or, lately, for me it involves shooting tons of Waffen-SS and trying to flank Panzers with my Shermans)
.... now that I'm looking for work.
I'm still pretty surprised that even after second interviews people aren't asking for references.. I have a pretty large number (over a dozen, with permission of course) of folks in a range of positions and areas (not just tech).
Granted, the last hellhole I suffered in was far worse. The place was run like a fucking gulag, and while I'm no fan of cashing in 401ks to make rent, I would rather be doing that and dodging credit card callers than trying not to kick certain people down certain flights of stairs.
And my favorite job would still be there, and me thriving in it, if it weren't for some fucking Arab terrorists. All the sponsors and advertisers for the project pulled out within a week of 9/11. Didn't help that our building was 6 blocks away.
In much the same way Warner Brothers characters would begin to resemble food products when trapped on a desert island, The Ax is beginning to look like a HOWTO...
AFAICR there's a separate 'family' license for like $200 which lets you install up to 5 boxes and stay legal.
Mac OS X isn't revolutionary. It really is the synthesis of everything that we all wanted in an OS back in the late 1980s. If you take the better features of early Macintosh, Amiga, and all those competing projects that were attempting add a GUI to Unix, and mung them all together and then work out most of the kinks, you end up with Mac OS X.
;)
That sounds more KDE to me! And that's why I prefer KDE to any other non-OS X UI!
Seriously, the OS X UI and Cocoa frameworks are much cleaner and better thought-out than a munged hodgepodge of paradigms. Apple's value proposition is related to not just the technical underpinnings but the thoughtfulness of design and attention to end users. Apple sweats the interface details.
And the real question now is. . . Where do we go from here? After achieving the OS that everybody wanted 15+ years ago, now Apple's OS team suddenly find themselves without a goal. They've resorted to tacking on a hodgepodge of minor trinkets and calling it a major upgrade. It must be hard to step back and admit that they're done with this OS, and that continually adding new features to it may no longer be the right approach.
I'm not gonna try to push Tiger as a huge innovation, I have sympathy for your point here. However, to a certain extent, if maintaining OS X on the cutting edge (which may be a relatively slow crawl at times, if you're waiting for enough hardware to drive the really revolutionary stuff like voice recog or more miniaturization or whatnot) means putting up with continuous point releases to keep engineers working, that's fine with me. The US gov't does this to a degree with companies like Electric Boat: they don't _need_ new ships all the time, but they need to maintain the ability to build them, and they can't afford to let the skilled people become unavailable. If keeping a solid core of engineers at Apple paid and happy means the occasional softball release, so be it.
And honestly, I don't think Tiger's a softball release. For me, Panther was, and for any particular Macista a particular OSX release may be. But Tiger's got interesting stuff at the framework level, and who knows how useful Spotlight and Dashboard stuff will be?
If it was up to me, I would focus on maintenance, bugfixes, security, optimization. . . and de-emphasize the OS as a product. Put the OS back in its proper place, I say! An operating system shouldn't be a featured product, it should be merely a component -- a part of the computer, just like the hard drive, the RAM, the processor, etc. -- that is required for running applications.
Work for Intel then?
Seriously, when it comes to defining the place for an OS, you have to take the user into account. This attitude is great for hardware folks and embedded developers, but for desktop people it's toxic. As an end user, I want someone _else_ to make a lot of these decisions, because I don't want to waste my time on them. Having an 'advanced user' preference pane to offer finer-grained control of things is nice, but it shouldn't be necessary for normals.
The goal should be to provide a stable, efficient foundation for apps to run on, because apps are where your work gets done.
Sounds like a kernel to me, and Darwin does a pretty decent job of this. Cocoa frameworks also contribute, and Apple's OS releases typically contain a ton of interesting framework improvements (like CoreImage and CoreVideo for Tiger for example.. Imagine realtime SGI-like stream filters for video and image effects) that make upgrading worthwhile (and mandatory for the new apps enabled and/or improved by these new optimized libs).
I agree, I look at OS X releases as being similar to Linux 'stable' releases, less comprehensive at the kernel level but making up for that at the UI level.
;)
I still think it would make sense for Apple to just go with Mac OS X as the name of the OS, and not link it to the previous OS version.. It really isn't version 10 in line with the previous 20 year chain of development at all. When enough people have migrated off of 'classic' Mac OS, Apple should break the link and just go with Mac OS X as the OS name. Also, you'd have a version 0, which AFAIK would be a first for a production release of an OS (the initial release of Mac OS X, should they change to this mechanism, would technically be Mac OS X v 0.0
So the next release should be Mac OS X version 5, or shortened to X.5 (or X.V for the anal).
I actually see it the other way round.
;)
Granted, I bitch and whine all the time about how crap Apple's default graphics boards are so primitive compared to the latest and greatest, and because of that OS X gaming won't be on the cutting edge.
However, for the UI stuff that doesn't require constant high framerate + 3D rendering + physics + AI, these GPUs should be completely tits for Quartz Extreme.
That is to say, for nongaming purposes, these GPUs are essentially desktop accelerators and feature enablers. Even the lowly FX5200 and Radeon 9200 w/32 or 64MB RAM is fine for this.
If Tiger ends up pushing more work onto these (for Macs) underworked GPUs, the UI will actually _speed up_. And the lowest-spec Mac (Mac mini) will have enough GPU to handle Quartz Extreme handily, while those with older AGP Macs should still be able to find 32/64MB QE cards fairly cheap.
And to be quite honest, one of the main reasons I built a dual celeron back in the day was to have all my KDE candy run more responsively.. I have no problem dedicating a cpu towards UI vanity
This would be great iff we could boot ignorant, dimwitted, lazy, and whiny native borns at the same time..
;)
(then again, maybe I shouldn't ask too loud
... is that a few years ago NYC's own commuter tax was ruled unconstitutional.
Granted, this means NYC workers who live out of state are merely double fucked instead of triple fucked.
And NYC people get the fist thanks to upstaters getting more for their tax dollar than NYCers.
Viva the Free State of Gotham!
If I can kick my gaming addictions, I could lose Windows completely.
.5)
:p
The 2.5 big problems with OS X gaming:
* delays of 6-12 months in porting, and only the popular games get ported
* performance is lower (at least in Doom3 and some other GL games)
* games cost more and are harder to get pirated (this is the
To be quite honest, I'm completely addicted to OpenTTD, which runs like lightning on my 667mhz TiPB. It runs on Linux and other OSes, and I've run it out to 1920x1200.
Another good game is a port of 'Elite' to OS X called 'Oolite'. It's even built in Xcode so it was super simple for me to put in a tiny hack to support improved scaling of keyboard repetition feedback.
UT2004 is available for OSX. As is World of Warcraft, WC3, Doom3, Halo, Sim*, Homeworld 2, MoH, CoD, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, et al. The games are there, it just took awhile for them to make the transition.
I'm definitely able to waste whole weeks on my Powerbook playing OpenTTD, which is handy given there isn't a whole lot else to do in between job interviews and nagging headhunters
... if you don't like it, write your own replacement that isn't in java.
One has to wonder when some enterprising group will just take the file format code and bung it into open competitors that don't rely on Java. I would prefer the KOffice suite, but LTIC OO.o had the superior MSOffice format functionality.
Its the dirty little secret of /. that for all of our pro-Linux, "I love OSX" rhetoric, Slashdot users use mostly Wintel.
;)
You sure that's not just people hacking their user agents to get around website brain damage?
(But I won't go into them here. The mac police would only mod me Troll)
If it isn't already done, I'd like to humbly nominate Otis' law of Mod whining: Those who post whines about moderation get mod'd down regardless of the content of the rest of the post. Including this post of course
(if there's already such a law (a distant relative of Godwin's law) let me know)
... thanks to Sony's choice to proprietarize the UMD rather than just using a mini DVD in a caddy. I can pretty much guarantee that nobody's gonna rebuy movies for this thing, at least in the US. Yeah, you could put movies on a mildly less proprietary Memory Stick, but teens aren't gonna have the $$$ for tons of 512MB sticks..
Of course, the geek bandolier squad will come out with the whole 'single purpose devices are better' argument, and I'm sure plenty of geeks and game fiends will buy the PSP and only play games on it. For me, though, $250 is a bit rich for that, and the so-called multifunctionality is a bit of a snow job due to Sony's longstanding format nonsensicality.
I just want to see Apple take that gorgeous LCD and wrap a star-killing PDA phone around it, using a scaled-up iPod mini look with touchscreen. Something with internal disk, HWR, 3G, voice recognition (for bluetooth headset/handsfree dialing etc.), the works. Adding the ability to run Dashboard apps even if you don't use a PPC full-blown OS X env would be super kewl.
If you've got suggestions, I'm sure the GNOME and KDE people would be more than happy to read them...
Then again Apple seems to be doing a pretty good job of releasing whole new apps (and occasionally new app categories), libraries/frameworks, programming tools and "paradigms" with new OS releases, not just eye candy..
(with apologies to Rudy Rucker)
.. it can handle a 4" 16x9 screen, 720x480 resolution.
* beef out the ipod mini case style so...
*
* make it a touchscreen
* emulate the ipod interface with the touchscreen
* select a video and hold the unit sideways to watch the video.. Home videos, PVR recordings, iMovies, ripped DVDs, etc.
* incorporate a 3G phone, bluetooth and wifi
* Newton/Inkwell HWR and full PDA functionality
* drop in a 60g drive, with firewire 800 and usb2
* nice to have: GPS (probably part of the 3G phone chipset
* Super cool: put in support for Dashboard apps!!